SWEETNESS! 
AND LIGHT 




HzXTTHEW ARNOLD f; 




Class., ^H4^ 2.^ 

Book„ .^1 

CopightN" JADi_ 

COPfRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



\ 



SWEETNESS 
Light 




Arnold -^ 



fLM.C^ldwell Co. 
t^ew York--"' Boston. 



3 D ^ 3 ^ ) J 3 1 3 



THF. LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copita Received 

SEP. 9 1901 

^ COPVRIOHT ENTRY 

CLASS ^XXc. Hj>. 
COPY ii. 



I .. . m ' I 



Copyright, igoi 
By H. M. Cai.dwki.1. Co. 



( C C ^ ( c 

• • • 

c c c e • 



i 
1 



Sweetness and Light 



Introdtiction 

TN one of his speeches a short time 
ago, that fine speaker and famous 
Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to 
have a fling at the friends and preach- 
ers of culture. " People who talk 
about what they call culture ! " said he, 
contemptuously ; " by which they 
mean a smattering of the two dead 
languages of Greek and Latin." And 
he went on to remark, in a strain with 
which modern speakers and writers 
have made us very familiar, how poor 
a thing this culture is, how little good 
vii 



^ Introduction 

it can do to the world, and how absurd 
it is for its possessors to set much store 
by it. And the other day a younger 
Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a 
school whose mission it is to bring into 
order and system that body of truth 
with which the earlier Liberals merely 
fumbled, a member of the University 
of Oxford, and a very clever writer, 
Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed, in 
the systematic and stringent manner 
of his school, the thesis which Mr. 
Bright had propounded in only general 
terms. " Perhaps the very silliest cant 
of the day," said Mr. Frederic Harri- 
son, " is the cant about culture. Cul- 
ture is a desirable quality in a critic of 
new books, and sits well on a possessor 
of belles-lettres ; but as applied to poli- 
tics, it means simply a turn for small 
viii 



Introduction ^ 

fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and 
indecision in action. The man of cul- 
ture is in politics one of the poorest 
mortals alive. For simple pedantry 
and want of good sense no man is his 
equal. No assumption is too unreal, 
no end is too unpractical for him. 
But the active exercise of politics re- 
quires commonsense, sympathy, trust, 
resolution, and enthusiasm, qualities 
which your man of culture has care- 
fully rooted up, lest they damage the 
delicacy of his critical olfactories. 
Perhaps they are the only class of re- 
sponsible beings in the community 
who cannot with safety be entrusted 
with power." 

Now for my part I do not wish to see 
men of culture asking to be entrusted 
with power 5 and, indeed, I have freely 
ix 






Introduction 



said that in my opinion the speech 
most proper, at present, for a man of 
culture to make to a body of his fellow 
countrymen who get him into a com- 
mittee-room, is Socrates' '' Know 
thyself! " and this is not a speech to 
be made by men wanting to be en- 
trusted with power. For this very 
indifference to direct political action I 
have been taken to task by the Daily 
Telegraphy coupled, by a strange per- 
versity of fate, with just that very one 
of the Hebrew prophets whose style 
I admire the least, and called " an ele- 
gant Jeremiah." It is because I say 
(to use the words which the Daily Tele- 
graph puts in my mouth) : " You 
mustn't make a fuss because you have 
no vote, — that is vulgarity ; you 
mustn't hold big meetings to agitate 



Introduction ^ 

for reform bills and to repeal corn 
laws, — that is the very height of vul- 
garity," — it is for this reason that I 
am called sometimes an elegant Jere- 
miah, sometimes a spurious Jeremiah, 
a Jeremiah about the reality of whose 
mission the writer in the Daily Telegraph 
has his doubts. It is evident, therefore, 
that I have so taken my line as not to 
be exposed to the whole brunt of Mr. 
Frederic Harrison's censure. Still, 
I have often spoken in praise of cul- 
ture, I have striven to make all my 
works and ways serve the interests of 
culture. I take culture to be some- 
thing a great deal more than what Mr. 
Frederic Harrison and others call it : 
" a desirable quality in a critic of new 
books." Nay, even though to a cer- 
tain extent I am disposed to agree with 
xi 



^ Introduction 

Mr. Frederic Harrison, that men of 
culture are just the class of responsible 
beings in this community of ours who 
cannot properly, at present, be en- 
trusted with power, I am not sure that 
I do not think this the fault of our 
community rather than of the men of 
culture. In short, although, like Mr. 
Bright, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, and 
the editor of the Daily Telegraphy and 
a large body of valued friends of mine, 
I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal 
tempered by experience, reflection, and 
renouncement, and I am, above all, a 
believer in culture. Therefore I pro- 
pose now to try and inquire, in the 
simple unsystematic way which best 
suits both my taste and my powers, 
what culture really is, what good it 
can do, what is our own special need 
xii 



Introduction ^ 

of it; and I shall seek to find some 
plain grounds on which a faith in 
culture — both my own faith in it 
and the faith of others — may rest 
securely. 



xm 



Sweetness and Light 



CHAPTER I. 

npHE disparagers of culture make its 
motive curiosity ; sometimes, in- 
deed, they make its motive mere 
exclusiveness and vanity. The cul- 
ture which is supposed to plume itself 
on a smattering of Greek and Latin is 
a culture which is begotten by nothing 
so intellectual as curiosity ; it is valued 
either out of sheer vanity and igno- 
rance or else as an engine of social and 
class distinction, separating its holder, 
like a badge or title, from other people 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

who have not got it. No serious man 
would call this culture^ or attach any 
value to it, as culture, at all. To find 
the real ground for the very different 
estimate which serious people will set 
upon culture, we must find some mo- 
tive for culture in the terms of which 
may lie a real ambiguity ; and such a 
motive the word curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out that 
we English do not, like the foreigners, 
use this word in a good sense as well 
as in a bad sense. With us the word 
is always used in a somewhat disap- 
proving sense. A liberal and intelli- 
gent eagerness about the things of the 
mind may be meant by a foreigner 
when he speaks of curiosity, but with 
us the word always conveys a certain 
notion of frivolous and unedifying ac- 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

tivity. In the ^arterly Review^ some 
Httle time ago, was an estimate of the cel- 
ebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, 
and a very inadequate estimate it in my 
judgment was. And its inadequacy 
consisted chiefly in this : that in our 
English way it left out of sight the 
double sense really involved in the 
word curiosity^ thinking enough was 
said to stamp M. Sainte-Beuve with 
blame if it was said that he Vas im- 
pelled in his operations as a critic by 
curiosity, and omitting either to per- 
ceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, 
and many other people with him, 
v/ould consider that this was praise- 
worthy and not blameworthy, or to 
point out why it ought really to be 
accounted worthy of blame and not 
of praise. For as there is a curiosity 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

about intellectual matters which is 
futile, and merely a disease, so there is 
certainly a curiosity — a desire after the 
things of the mind simply for their 
own sakes and for the pleasure of see- 
ing them as they are — which is, in an 
intelligent being, natural and laudable. 
Nay, and the very desire to see things 
as they are implies a balance and 
regulation of mind which is not often 
attained without fruitful effort, and 
which is the very opposite of the blind 
and diseased impulse of mind which is 
what v/e mean to blame when we 
blame curiosity. Montesquieu says : 
" The first motive which ought to im- 
pel us to study is the desire to augment 
the excellence of our nature, and to 
render an intelligent being yet more 
intelligent." This is the true ground 
4 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

to assign for the genuine scientific pas- 
sion, however manifested, and for cul- 
ture, viewed simply as a fruit of this 
passion ; and it is a worthy ground, 
even though we let the term curiosity 
stand to describe it. 

But there is of culture another view, 
in which not solely the scientific pas- 
sion, the sheer desire to see things as 
they are, natural and proper in an in- 
telligent being, appears as the ground 
of it. There is a view in which all the 
love of our neighbour, the impulses 
toward action, help, and beneficence, 
the desire for removing human error, 
clearing human confusion, and dimin- 
ishing human misery, the noble aspira- 
tion to leave the world better and 
happier than we found it, — motives 
eminently such as are called social, — 
5 



^ Sweetness and Light 

come in as part of the grounds of cul- 
ture, and the main and preeminent 
part. Culture is then properly de- 
scribed not as having its origin in 
curiosity, but as having its origin in 
the love of perfection ; it is <a' study of 
perfection. It moves by the force, not 
merely or primarily of the scientific 
passion for pure knowledge, but also 
of the moral and social passion for 
doing good. As, in the first view of 
it, we took for its worthy motto Mon- 
tesquieu's words : " To render an in- 
telligent being yet more intelligent ! " 
so, in the second view of it, there is no 
better motto which it can have than 
these words of Bishop Wilson : " To 
make reason and the will of God pre- 
vail ! " 

Only, whereas the passion for doing 
6 



Sweetn ess and Light ^ 

good is apt to be over hasty in deter- 
mining what reason and the will of 
God say, because its turn is for acting 
rather than thinking, and it wants to 
be beginning to act ; and whereas it is 
apt to take its own conceptions, which 
proceed from its own state of develop- 
ment and share in all the imperfections 
and immaturities of this, for a basis 
of action. What distinguishes culture 
is, that it is possessed by the scientific 
passion as well as by the passion of 
doing good j that it demands worthy 
notions of reason and the will of God, 
and does not readily suffer its own 
crude conceptions to substitute them- 
selves for them. And knowing that 
no action or institution can be salutary 
and stable which is not based on rea- 
son and the will of God, it is not so 
7 



^ Sweetness and Light 

bent on acting and instituting, even 
with the great aim of diminishing 
human error and misery ever before its 
thoughts, but that it can remember 
that acting and instituting are of Httle 
use, unless we know how and what we 
ought to act and to institute. 

This cuhure is more interesting and 
more far-reaching than that other, 
which is founded solely on the scien- 
tific passion for knowing. But it 
needs times of faith and ardour, times 
when the intellectual horizon is open- 
ing and widening all around us, to 
flourish in. And is not the close and 
bounded intellectual horizon within 
which we have long lived and moved 
now lifting up, and are not new 
lights finding free passage to shine in 
upon us ? For a long time there was 
8 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

no passage for them to make their way 
in upon us, and then it was of no use 
to think of adapting the world's action 
to them. Where was the hope of 
making reason and the will of God 
prevail among people who had a rou- 
tine which they had christened reason 
and the will of God, in which they 
were inextricably bound, and beyond 
which they had no power of looking ? 
But now the iron force of adhesion to 
the old routine — social, political, re- 
ligious — has wonderfully yielded ; 
the iron force of exclusion of all which 
is new has wonderfully yielded. The 
danger now is, not that people should 
obstinately refuse to allow anything 
but their old routine to pass for reason 
and the will of God, but either that 
they should allow some novelty or 
9 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

other to pass for these too easily, or 
else that they should underrate the 
importance of them altogether, and 
think it enough to follow action for its 
own sake, without troubling them- 
selves to make reason and the will of 
God prevail therein. Now, then, is 
the moment for culture to be of ser- 
vice, culture which believes in making 
reason and the will of God prevail, be- 
lieves in perfection, is the study and 
pursuit of perfection, and is no longer 
debarred, by a rigid invincible exclu- 
sion of whatever is new, from getting 
acceptance for its ideas, simply because 
they are new. 

The moment this view of culture is 
seized, the moment it is regarded not 
solely as the endeavour to see things as 
they are, to draw toward a knowledge 

10 



Sweetness and Light 






of the universal order which seems to 
be intended and aimed at in the world, 
and which it is a man's happiness to go 
along with or his misery to go counter 
to, — to learn, in short, the will of God, 
— the moment, I say, culture is con- 
sidered not merely as the endeavour to 
see and learn this, but as the endeavour, 
also, to make it prevail^ the moral, 
social, and beneficent character of cul- 
ture becomes manifest. The mere en- 
deavour to see and learn the truth for 
our own personal satisfaction is indeed 
a commencement for making it prevail, 
a preparing the way for this, which 
always serves this, and is wrongly, 
therefore, stamped with blame abso- 
lutely in itself, and not only in its 
caricature and degeneration. But per- 
haps it has got stamped with blame, 
II 



^ Sweetness and Light 

and disparaged with the dubious title 
of curiosity, because in comparison 
with this wider endeavour of such great 
and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, 
and unprofitable. 

And religion, the greatest and most 
important of the efforts by which the 
human race has manifested its impulse 
to perfect itself, — religion, that voice 
of the deepest human experience, — 
does not only enjoin and sanction the 
aim which is the great aim of culture, 
the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain 
what perfection is and to make it pre- 
vail ; but also, in determining generally 
in what human perfection consists, re- 
ligion comes to a conclusion identical 
with that which culture — culture 
seeking the determination of this ques- 
tion through all the voices of human 

12 



Sweetness and Light 






experience which have been heard 
upon it, of art, science, poetry, philoso- 
phy, history, as well as of religion, in 
order to give a greater fulness and 
certainty to its solution — likewise 
reaches. Religion says : The king- 
dom of God is within you ; and culture, 
in like manner, places human perfec- 
tion in an internal condition, in the 
growth and predominance of our hu- 
manity proper, as distinguished from 
our animality. It places it in the ever 
increasing efficacy and in the general 
harmonious expansion of those gifts 
of thought and feeling, which make 
the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happi- 
ness of human nature. As I have 
said on a former occasion : " It is in 
making endless additions to self, in the 
endless expansion of its powers, in 
13 



^ Sweetness and Light 

endless growth in wisdom and beauty, 
that the spirit of the human race finds 
its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture 
is an indispensable aid, and that is the 
true value of culture." Not a having 
and a resting, but a growing and a 
becoming, is the character of perfection 
as culture conceives it; and here, too, 
it coincides with religion. 

And because men are all members 
of one great whole, and the sympathy 
which is in human nature will not 
allow one member to be indifferent to 
the rest or to have a perfect welfare 
independent of the rest, the expansion 
of our humanity, to suit the idea of 
perfection which culture forms, must 
be a general expansion. Perfection, 
as culture conceives it, is not possible 
while the individual remains isolated. 
14 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

The individual is required, under pain 
of being stunted and enfeebled in his 
own development if he disobeys, to 
carry others along with him in his 
march toward perfection, to be con- 
tinually doing all he can to enlarge and 
increase the volume of the human 
stream sweeping thitherward. And 
here, once more, culture lays on us 
the same obligation as religion, which 
says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably 
put it, that " to promote the kingdom 
of God is to increase and hasten one's 
own happiness." 

But, finally, perfection — as culture 
from a thoroughly disinterested study 
of human nature and human experi- \ 
ence learns to conceive it — is a har- 
monious expansion of all the powers 
which make the beauty and worth of 
15 






Sweetness and Light 



human nature, and is not consistent 
with the over-development of any one 
power at the expense of the rest. 
Here culture goes beyond religion, as 
religion is generally conceived by us. 
If culture, then, is a study of perfec- 
tion, and of harmonious perfection, 
general perfection, and perfection 
which consists in becoming something 
rather than in having something, in an 
inward condition of the mind and spirit, 
not in an outward set of circumstances, 
— it is clear that culture, instead of 
being the frivolous and useless thing 
which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic 
Harrison, and many other Liberals are 
apt to call it, has a very important 
function to fulfil for mankind. And 
this function is particularly important 
in our modern world, of which the 
i6 



Sweetness and Lignt ^ 

whole civilisation is, to a much 
greater degree than the civilisation of 
Greece and Rome, mechanical and 
external, and tends constantly to be- 
come more so. But above all in our 
own country has culture a weighty 
part to perform, because here that 
mechanical character, which civilisa- 
tion tends to take everywhere, is 
shown in the most eminent degree. 
Indeed, nearly all the characters of 
perfection, as culture teaches us to fix 
them, meet in this country with some 
powerful tendency which thwarts them 
and sets them at defiance. The idea 
of perfection as an inward condition of 
the mind and spirit is at variance with 
the mechanical and material civilisa- 
tion in esteem with us, and nowhere, 
as I have said, so much in esteem as 
x7 



^ Sweetness and Light 

with us. The idea of perfection as a 
general expansion of the human family 
is at variance with our strong individ- 
uaHsm, our hatred of all limits to the 
unrestrained swing of the individual's 
personality, our maxim of " every man 
for himself." Above all, the idea of 
perfection as a harmonious expansion 
of human nature is at variance with 
our want of flexibility, with our inapti- 
tude for seeing more than one side of a 
thing, with our intense energetic ab- 
sorption in the particular pursuit we 
happen to be following. So culture 
has a rough task to achieve in this 
country. Its preachers have, and are 
likely long to have, a hard time of it, 
and they will much oftener be re- 
garded, for a great while to come, as 
elegant or spurious Jeremiahs than as 
i8 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

friends and benefactors. That, how- 
ever, will not prevent their doing in 
the end good service if they persevere. 
And, meanwhile, the mode of action 
they have to pursue, and the sort of 
habits they must fight against, ought to 
be made quite clear for every one to 
see, who may be willing to look at the 
matter attentively and dispassionately. 

Faith in machinery is, I said, our 
besetting danger; often in machinery 
most absurdly disproportioned to the 
end which this machinery, if it is to do 
any good at all, is to serve ; but always 
in machinery, as if it had a value in 
and for itself. What is freedom but 
machinery ? what is population but 
machinery ? what is coal but machin- 
ery ? what are railroads but machin- 
ery ? what is wealth but machinery ? 
19 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

what are, even, reHgious organisations, 
but machinery ? Now almost every 
voice in England is accustomed to 
speak of these things as if they were 
precious ends in themselves, and there- 
fore had some of the characters of per- 
fection indisputably joined to them. I 
have before now noticed Mr. Roe- 
buck's stock argument for proving the 
greatness and happiness of England 
as she is, and for quite stopping the 
mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. Roe- 
buck is never weary of reiterating this 
argument of his, so I do not know why 
I should be weary of noticing it. 
'' May not every man in England say 
what he likes ? " — Mr. Roebuck per- 
petually asks; and that, he thinks, is 
quite sufficient, and when every man 
may say what he likes, our aspirations 
20 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

ought to be satisfied. But the aspira- 
tions of culture, which is the study of 
perfection, are not satisfied, unless 
what men say, when they may say 
what they like, is worth saying, — has 
good in it, and more good than bad. 
In the same way the Times^ replying to 
some foreign strictures on the dress, 
looks, and behaviour of the English 
abroad, urges that the English ideal is 
that every one should be free to do and 
look just as he likes. But culture in- 
defatigably tries, not to make what 
each raw person may like the rule by 
which he fashions himself; but to 
draw ever nearer to a sense of what is 
indeed beautiful, graceful, and becom- 
ing, and to get the raw person to like 
that. 

And in the same way with respect 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

to railroads and coal. Every one must 
have observed the strange language 
current during the late discussions as 
to the possible failures of our supplies 
of coal. Our coal, thousands of people 
v^ere saying, is the real basis of our 
national greatness; if our coal runs 
short, there is an end of the greatness 
of England. But what is greatness ? 
— culture makes us ask. Greatness is 
a spiritual condition worthy to excite 
love, interest, and admiration ; and the 
outward proof of possessing greatness 
is that we excite love, interest, and 
admiration. If England were swal- 
lowed up by the sea to-morrow, which 
of the two, a hundred years hence, 
would most excite the love, interest, 
and admiration of mankind, — would 
most, therefore, show the evidences of 

22 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

having possessed greatness, — the 
England of the last twenty years, or 
the England of Elizabeth, of a time of 
splendid spiritual effort, but when our 
coal, and our industrial operations de- 
pending on coal, were very little de- 
veloped ? Well, then, what an unsound 
habit of mind it must be which makes 
us talk of things like coal or iron as 
constituting the greatness of England, 
and how salutary a friend is culture, 
bent on seeing things as they are, and 
thus dissipating delusions of this kind 
and fixing standards of perfection that 
are real ! 

Wealth, again, that end to which 
our prodigious works for material ad- 
vantage are directed, the commonest 
of commonplaces tells us how men are 
always apt to regard wealth as a pre- 
23 



^ Sweetness and Light 

cious end in itself; and certainly they 
have never been so apt thus to regard 
it as they are in England at the present 
time. Never did people believe any- 
thing more firmly than nine English- 
men out of ten at the present day 
believe that our greatness and welfare 
are proved by our being so very rich. 
Now, the use of culture is that it 
helps us, by means of its spiritual 
standard of perfection, to regard wealth 
but as machinery, and not only to say 
as a matter of words that we regard 
wealth as but machinery, but really to 
perceive and feel that it is so. If it were 
not for this purging effect wrought upon 
our minds by culture, the whole world, 
the future as well as the present, 
would inevitably belong to the Philis- 
tines, The people who believe most; 
24 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

that our greatness and welfare are 
proved by our being very rich, and 
who most give their lives and thoughts 
to becoming rich, are just the very 
people whom we call Philistines. Cul- 
ture says : " Consider these people, 
then, their way of life, their habits, 
their manners, the very tones of their 
voice j look at them attentively ; ob- 
serve the literature they read, the 
things which give them pleasure, the 
words which come forth out of their 
mouths, the thoughts which make the 
furniture of their minds ; would any 
amount of wealth be worth having, 
with the condition that one was to be- 
come just like these people by having 
it ? " And thus culture begets a dis- 
satisfaction which is of the highest 
possible value in stemming the com- 

25 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

mon tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy 
and industrial community, and which 
saves the future, as one may hope, 
from being vulgarised, even if it can- 
not save the present. 

Population, again, and bodily health 
and vigour, are things which are no- 
where treated in such an unintelligent, 
misleading, exaggerated way as in 
England. Both are really machinery ; 
yet how many people all around us do 
we see rest in them and fail to look 
beyond them ! Why, one has heard 
people, fresh from reading certain arti- 
cles of the Times on the Registrar- 
General's returns of marriages and 
births in this country, who would talk 
of our large English families in quite a 
solemn strain, as if they had something 
in itself beautiful, elevating, and meri- 
26 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

torious in them; as if the British 
Phihstine would have only to present 
himself before the Great Judge with his 
twelve children in order to be received 
among the sheep as a matter of right ! 
But bodily health and vigour, it may 
be said, are not to be classed with 
wealth and population as mere machin- 
ery y they have a more real and essen- 
tial value. True ; but only as they 
are more intimately connected with a 
perfect spiritual condition than wealth 
or population are. The moment we 
disjoin them from a perfect spiritual 
condition, and pursue them, as we do 
pursue them, for their own sake and as 
ends in themselves, our worship of 
them becomes as mere worship of ma- 
chinery, as our worship of wealth and 
population, and as unintelligent and 



^ Sweetness and Light 

vulgarising a worship as that is. Every 
one with anything Hke an adequate 
idea of human perfection has distinctly 
marked this subordination to higher 
and spiritual ends of the cultivation of 
bodily vigour and activity. " Bodily 
exercise profiteth little ; but godliness 
is profitable unto all things," says the 
author of the Epistle to Timothy. And 
the utilitarian Franklin says just as 
explicitly : " Eat and drink such an 
exact quantity as suits the constitution 
of thy body, in reference to the services 
of the mind,^^ But the point of view 
of culture, keeping the mark of human 
perfection simply and broadly in view, 
and not assigning to this perfection, as 
religion or utilitarianism assigns to it, 
a special and limited character, — this 
point of view, I say, of culture is best 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

given by these words of Epictetus : 
" It is a sign of d<^ma/' says he, — 
that is, of a nature not finely tempered, 
— " to give yourself up to things 
which relate to the body ; to make, for 
instance, a great fuss about exercise, a 
great fuss about eating, a great fuss 
about drinking, a great fuss about walk- 
ing, a great fuss about riding. All 
these things ought to be done merely 
by the way : the formation of the spirit 
and character must be our real con- 
cern." This is admirable ; and, indeed, 
the Greek word evcl>via, a finely tempered 
nature, gives exactly the notion of per- 
fection as culture brings us to conceive 
it : a harmonious perfection, a perfection 
in which the characters of beauty and 
intelligence are both present, which 
unites " the two noblest of things," — 
29 






Sweetness and Light 



as Swift, who of one of the two, at 
any rate, had himself all too little, most 
happily calls them in his " Battle of the 
Books," — " the two noblest of things, 
sweetness and lights The cv(f>vi^<s is the 
man who tends toward sweetness and 
light ; the dcjyvijs, on the other hand, is 
our Philistine. The immense spiritual 
significance of the Greeks is due to 
their having been inspired with this 
central and happy idea of the essential 
character of human perfection ; and 
Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, 
as a smattering of Greek and Latin, 
comes itself, after all, from this won- 
derful significance of the Greeks hav- 
ing affected the very machinery of our 
education, and is in itself a kind of 
homage to it. 

In thus making sweetness and light 
30 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

to be characters of perfection, cuhure 
is of hke spirit with poetry, follows 
one law with poetry. Far more than 
on our freedom, our population, and 
our industrialism, many amongst us 
rely upon our religious organisations 
to save us. I have called religion a 
yet more important manifestation of 
human nature than poetry, because it 
has worked on a broader scale for per- 
fection, and with greater masses of 
men. But the idea of beauty and of a 
human nature perfect on all its sides, 
which is the dominant idea of poetry, 
is a true and invaluable idea, though it 
has not yet had the success that the 
idea of conquering the obvious faults 
of our animality, and of a human 
nature perfect on the moral side, — 
which is the dominant idea of religion, 
31 



VkJ> 



Sweetness and Light 



— has been enabled to have ; and it is 
destined, adding to itself the religious 
idea of a devout energy, to transform 
and govern the other. 

The best art and poetry of the 
Greeks, in which religion and poetry 
are one, in which the idea of beauty 
and of a human nature perfect on all 
sides adds to itself a religious and 
devout energy, and works in the 
strength of that, is on this account of 
such surpassing interest and instruct- 
iveness for us, though it was — as, 
having regard to the human race in 
general, and, indeed, having regard to 
the Greeks themselves, we must own 

— a premature attempt, an attempt 
which for success needed the moral and 
religious fibre in humanity to be more 
braced and developed than it had yet 

32 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

been. But Greece did not err in hav- 
ing the idea of beauty, harmony, and 
complete human perfection so present 
and paramount. It is impossible to 
have this idea too present and para- 
mount ; only, the moral fibre must be 
braced too. And we, because we have 
braced the moral fibre, are not on that 
account in the right way, if at the 
same time the idea of beauty, harmony, 
and complete human perfection is 
wanting or misapprehended amongst 
us ; and evidently it is wanting or 
misapprehended at present. And when 
we rely as we do on our religious 
organisations, which in themselves do 
not and cannot give us this idea, 
and think we have done enough 
if we make them spread and pre- 
vail, then, I say, we fall into our 
[33 



^ Sweetness and Light 

common fault of over-valuing ma- 
chinery. 

Nothing is more common than for 
people to confound the inward peace 
and satisfaction which follow the sub- 
duing of the obvious faults of our ani- 
rnality with what I may call absolute 
inward peace and satisfaction, — the 
peace and satisfaction which are 
reached as we draw near to complete 
spiritual perfection, and not merely to 
moral perfection, or rather to relative 
moral perfection. No people in the 
world have done more and struggled 
more to attain this relative moral per- 
fection than our English race has. For 
no people in the world has the com- 
mand to resist the dev'il^ to overcome the 
wicked one^ in the nearest and most 
obvious sense of those words, had such 
34 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

a pressing force and reality. And we 
have had our reward, not only in the 
great worldly prosperity which our 
obedience to this command has brought 
us, but also, and far more, in great in- 
ward peace and satisfaction. But to 
me few things are more pathetic than 
to see people, on the strength of the 
inward peace and satisfaction which 
their rudimentary efforts toward per- 
fection have brought them, employ, 
concerning their incomplete perfection 
and the religious organisations within 
which they have found it, language 
which properly applies only to com- 
plete perfection, and is a far-off echo 
of the human soul's prophecy of it. 
Religion itself, I need hardly say, sup- 
plies them in abundance with this 
grand language. And very freely do 
35 



^ Sweetness and Light 

they use it ; yet it is really the severest 
possible criticism of such an incom- 
plete perfection as alone we have yet 
reached through our religious organi- 
sations. 

The impulse of the English race 
toward moral development and self- 
conquest has nowhere so powerfully 
manifested itself as in Puritanism. No- 
where has Puritanism found so ade- 
quate an expression as in the religious 
organisation of the Independents. The 
modern Independents have a news- 
paper, the Nonconformist^ written with 
great sincerity and ability. The motto, 
the standard, the profession of faith 
which this organ of theirs carries aloft, 
is : " The Dissidence of Dissent and 
the Protestantism of the Protestant re- 
ligion." There is sweetness and light 
36 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

and an ideal of complete harmonious 
human perfection ! One need not go to 
culture and poetry to find language to 
judge it. Religion, with its instinct 
for perfection, supplies language to 
judge it, language, too, which is in our 
mouths every day. " Finally, be of 
one mind, united in feeling," says St. 
Peter. There is an ideal which judges 
the Puritan ideal : " The Dissidence of 
Dissent and the Protestantism of the 
Protestant religion ! " And religious 
organisations like this are what people 
believe in, rest in, and give their lives 
for ! Such, I say, is the wonderful 
virtue of even the beginnings of per- 
fection, of having conquered even the 
plain faults of our animality, that the 
religious organisation which has helped 
us to do it can seem to us something 
Z1 



^ Sweetness and Light 

precious, salutary, and to be propa- 
gated, even when it wears such a brand 
of imperfection on its forehead as this. 
And men have got such a habit of 
giving to the language of religion a 
special application, of making it a 
mere jargon, that for the condemnation 
which religion itself passes on the 
shortcomings of their religious organi- 
sations they have no ear; they are sure 
to cheat themselves and to explain this 
condemnation away. They can only 
be reached by the criticism which cul- 
ture, like poetry, speaking a language 
not to be sophisticated, and resolutely 
testing these organisations by the ideal 
of a human perfection complete on all 
sides, applies to them. 

But men of culture and poetry, it 
will be said, are again and again fail- 
38 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

ing, and failing conspicuously, in the 
necessary first stage to a harmonious 
perfection, in the subduing of the great 
obvious faults of our animality, which 
it is the glory of these religious organi- 
sations to have helped us to subdue. 
True, they do often so fail. They have 
often been without the virtues as well 
as the faults of the Puritan ; it has 
been one of their dangers that they so 
felt the Puritan's faults that they too 
much neglected the practice of his 
virtues. I will not, however, exculpate 
them at the Puritan's expense. They 
have often failed in morality, and 
morality is indispensable. And they 
have been punished for their failure, as 
the Puritan has been rewarded for his 
performance. They have been pun- 
ished wherein they erred ; but their 
39 






Sweetness and Light 



ideal of beauty, of sweetness and light, 
and a human nature complete on all 
its sides, remains the true ideal of per- 
fection still \ just as the Puritan's ideal 
of perfection remains narrow and inade- 
quate, although for what he did well 
he has been richly rewarded. Notwith- 
standing the mighty results of the 
Pilgrim Fathers' voyage, they and 
their standard of perfection are rightly 
judged when we figure to ourselves 
Shakespeare or Virgil — souls in whom 
sweetness and light, and all that in 
human nature is most humane, were 
eminent — accompanying them on their 
voyage, and think what intolerable 
company Shakespeare and Virgil would 
have found them ! In the same way 
let us judge the religious organisations 
which we see all around us. Do not 
40 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

let us deny the good and the happiness 
which they have accomplished ; but do 
not fail to let us see clearly that their 
idea of human perfection is narrow and 
inadequate, and that the Dissidence of 
Dissent and the Protestantism of the 
Protestant religion will never bring 
humanity to its true goal. As I said 
with regard to wealth : Let us look at 
the life of those who live in and for it, 
— so I say with regard to the religious 
organisations. Look at the life imaged 
in such a newspaper as the Noncon- 
formist^ — a life of jealousy of the 
Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, 
openings of chapels, sermons ; and 
then think of it as an ideal of a human 
life completing itself on all sides, and 
aspiring with all its organs after sweet- 
ness, light, and perfection ! 
41 






Sweetness and Light 



Another newspaper, representing, 
Hke the Nonconformist^ one of the 
religious organisations of this country, 
was a short time ago giving an ac- 
count of the crowd at Epsom on the 
Derby day, and of all the vice and 
hideousness which was to be seen in 
that crowd ; and then the writer turned 
suddenly around upon Professor Hux- 
ley, and asked him how he proposed 
to cure all this vice and hideousness 
without religion. I confess I felt dis- 
posed to ask the asker this question : 
And how do you propose to cure it 
with such a religion as yours ? How 
is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so un- 
attractive, so incomplete, so narrow, 
so far removjed from a true and satisfy- 
ing ideal of human perfection, as is the 
life of your religious organisation as 
42 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

you yourself reflect it, to conquer and 
transform all this vice and hideous- 
ness ? Indeed, the strongest plea for 
the study of perfection as pursued by 
culture, the clearest proof of the actual 
inadequacy of the idea of perfection 
held by the religious organisations, — 
expressing, as I have said, the most 
widespread effort which the human 
race has yet made after perfection, — is 
to be found in the state of our life and 
society with these in possession of it, 
and having been in possession of it I 
know not how many hundred years. 
We are all of us included in some 
religious organisation or other; we all 
call ourselves, in the sublime and as- 
piring language of religion which I 
have before noticed, children of God. 
Children of God ; — it is an immense 
43 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

pretension ! — and how are we to justify 
it ? By the works which we do, and 
the words which we speak. And the 
work which we collective children of 
God do, our grand centre of life, our 
city which we have builded for us to 
dwell in, is London ! London, with 
its unutterable external hideousness, 
and with its internal canker of publice 
egestas^ privatim opulentia^ — to use the 
words which Sallust puts into Cato's 
mouth about Rome, — unequalled in 
the world ! The word, again, which 
we children of God speak, the voice 
which most hits our collective thought, 
the newspaper with the largest circula- 
tion in England, nay, with the largest 
circulation in the whole world, is the 
Daily Telegraph ! I say that when 
our religious organisations — which I 
44 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

admit to express the most considerable 
effort after perfection that our race has 
yet made — land us in no better result 
than this, it is high time to examine 
carefully their idea of perfection, to see 
whether it does not leave out of account 
sides and forces of human nature which 
we might turn to great use ; whether it 
would not be more operative if it were 
more complete. And I say that the 
English reliance on our religious or- 
ganisations and on their ideas of hu- 
man perfection just as they stand, is 
like our reliance on freedom, on mus- 
cular Christianity, on population, on 
coal, on wealth, — mere belief in ma- 
chinery, and unfruitful; and that it is 
wholesomely counteracted by culture, 
bent on seeing things as they are, and on 
drawing the human race onward to a 
45 



^ Sweetness and Light 

more complete, a harmonious perfec- 
tion. 

Culture, however, shows its single- 
minded love of perfection, its desire 
simply to make reason and the will 
of God prevail, its freedom from fanati- 
cism, by its attitude toward all this 
machinery, even while it insists that it 
is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the 
mischief men do themselves by their 
blind belief in some machinery or 
other, — whether it is wealth and in- 
dustrialism, or whether it is the culti- 
vation of bodily strength and activity, 
or whether it is a political organisation, 
or whether it is a religious organisation, 
— oppose with might and main the 
tendency to this or that political and 
religious organisation, or to games and 
athletic exercises, or to wealth and in- 
46 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

dustrialism, and try violently to stop 
it. But the flexibility which sweetness 
and light give, and which is one of the 
rewards of culture pursued in good 
faith, enables a man to see that a ten- 
dency may be necessary, and even, as 
a preparation for something in the fu- 
ture, salutary, and yet that the gener- 
ations or individuals who obey this 
tendency are sacrificed to it, that they 
fall short of the hope of perfection by 
following it ; and that its mischiefs are 
to be criticised, lest it should take too 
firm a hold and last after it has served 
its purpose. 

Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a 
speech at Paris, — and others have 
pointed out the same thing, — how 
necessary is the present great move- 
ment toward wealth and industrialism, 
47 



^ Sweetness and Light 

in order to lay broad foundations of 
material well-being for the society of 
the future. The worst of these justi- 
fications is, that they are generally ad- 
dressed to the very people engaged, 
body and soul, in the movement in 
question ; at all events, that they are 
always seized with the greatest avidity 
by these people, and taken by them as 
quite justifying their life ; and that thus 
they tend to harden them in their sins. 
Now, culture admits the necessity of 
the movement toward fortune-making 
and exaggerated industrialism, readily 
allows that the future may derive bene- 
fit from it; but insists, at the same 
time, that the passing generations of 
industrialists — forming, for the most 
part, the stout main body of Philistin- 
ism — are sacrificed to it. In the 
48 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

same way, the result of all the games 
and sports which occupy the passing 
generation of boys and young men may 
be the establishment of a better and 
sounder physical type for the future to 
work with. Culture does not set itself 
against the games and sports ; it con- 
gratulates the future, and hopes it will 
make a good use of its improved phys- 
ical basis ; but it points out that our 
passing generation of boys and young 
men is, meantime, sacrificed. Puritan- 
ism was perhaps necessary to develop 
the moral fibre of the English race, 
nonconformity to break the yoke of 
ecclesiastical domination over men's 
minds, and to prepare the way for free- 
dom of thought in the distant future ; 
still, culture points out that the har- 
monious perfection of generations of 
49 



Sweetness and Light 



Puritans and nonconformists has been, 
in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom 
of speech may be necessary for the 
society of the future, but the young 
lions of the Daily Telegraph in the 
meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for 
every man in his country's government 
may be necessary for the society of the 
future, but meanwhile Mr. Beales and 
Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed. 

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has 
many faults ; and she has heavily paid 
for them in defeat, in isolation, in want 
of hold upon the modern world. Yet 
we in Oxford, brought up amidst the 
beauty and sweetness of that beautiful 
•place, have not failed to seize one truth, 
— the truth that beauty and sweetness 
are essential characters of a complete 
human perfection. When I insist on 
50 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

this, I am all in the faith and tradition 
of Oxford. I say boldly that this our 
sentiment for beauty and sweetness, 
our sentiment against hideousness and 
rawness, has been at the bottom of our 
attachment to so many beaten causes, 
of our opposition to so many trium- 
phant movements. And the sentiment 
is true, and has never been wholly de- 
feated, and has shown its power even 
in its defeat. We have not won our 
political battles, we have not carried 
our main points, we have not stopped 
our adversaries' advance, we have not 
marched victoriously with the modern 
world ; but we have told silently upon 
the mind of the country, we have pre- 
pared currents of feeling which sap our 
adversaries' position when it seems 
gained, we have kept up our own com- 
51 






g Sweetness and Light 



munications with the future. Look at 
the course of the great movement 
which shook Oxford to its centre some 
thirty years ago ! It was directed, as 
any one who reads Doctor Newman's 
" Apology " may see, against what in 
one word may be called " Liberalism." 
Liberalism prevailed ; it was the ap- 
pointed force to do the work of the 
hour; it was necessary, it was inevi- 
table that it should prevail. The 
Oxford movement was broken, it 
failed ; our wrecks are scattered on 
every shore : 

" Quae regie in terris nostri non plena 
laboris ? " 

But what was it, this liberalism, as 
Doctor Newman saw it, and as it really 
broke the Oxford movement ? It was 

52 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

the great middle-class liberalism, which 
had for the cardinal points of its belief 
the Reform Bill of 1832, and local self- 
government in politics ; in the social 
sphere, free trade, unrestricted compe- 
tition, and the making of large indus- 
trial fortunes ; in the religious sphere, 
the Dissidence of Dissent and the 
Protestantism of the Protestant relig- 
ion. I do not say that other and more 
intelligent forces than this were not 
opposed to the Oxford movement ; but 
this was the force which really beat it ; 
this was the force which Doctor New- 
man felt himself fighting with ; this was 
the force which till only the other day 
seemed to be the paramount force in 
this country, and to be In possession 
of the future ; this was the force whose 
achievements fill Mr. Lowe with such 
5^ 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

inexpressible admiration, and whose 
rule he was so horror-struck to see 
threatened. And where is this great 
force of Philistinism now ? It is thrust 
into the second rank, it is become a 
power of yesterday, it has lost the 
future. A new power has suddenly 
appeared, a power which it is impos- 
sible yet to judge fully, but which is 
certainly a wholly difFerent force from 
middle-class liberalism ; difFerent in its 
cardinal points of belief, difFerent in its 
tendencies in every sphere. It loves 
and admires neither the legislation of 
middle-class Parliaments, nor the local 
self-government of middle-class ves- 
tries, nor the unrestricted competition 
of middle-class industrialists, nor the 
dissidence of middle-class Dissent and 
the Protestantism of middle-class Prot^ 
54 



Sweetness and Light 






estant religion. I am not now praising 
this new force, or saying that its own 
ideals are better j all I say is, that they 
are wholly different. And who will 
estimate how much the currents of feel- 
ing created by Doctor Newman's move- 
ments, the keen desire for beauty and 
sweetness which it nourished, the deep 
aversion it manifested to the hardness 
and vulgarity of middle-class liberal- 
ism, the strong light it turned on the 
hideous and grotesque illusions of mid- 
dle-class Protestantism, — who will es- 
timate how much all these contributed 
to swell the tide of secret dissatisfaction 
which has mined the ground under 
self-confident liberalisqi of the last 
thirty years, and has prepared the way 
for its sudden collapse and superses- 
sion ? It is in this manner that the 
S5 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

sentiment of Oxford for beauty and 
sweetness conquers, and in this man- 
ner long may it continue to con- 
quer ! 

In this manner it works to the same 
end as culture, and there is plenty of 
work for it yet to do. I have said that 
the new and more democratic force 
which is now superseding our old mid- 
dle-class liberalism cannot yet be rightly 
judged. It has its main tendencies 
still to form. We hear promises of its 
giving us administrative reform, law 
reform, reform of education, and I 
know not what ; but those promises 
come rather from its advocates, wish- 
ing to make a good plea for it and to 
justify it for superseding middle-class 
liberalism, than from clear tendencies 
which it has itself yet developed. But 
56 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

meanwhile it has plenty of well-inten- 
tioned friends against whom culture 
may with advantage continue to up- 
hold steadily its ideal of human per- 
fection ; that this is an inward spiritual 
activity having for its characters in- 
creased sweetness^ increased light ^ in- 
creased life^ increased sympathy. Mr. 
Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, 
the world of middle-class liberalism 
and the world of democracy, but who 
brings most of his ideas from the 
world of middle-class liberalism in 
which he was bred, always inclines to 
inculcate that faith in machinery to 
which, as we have seen, Englishmen 
are so prone, and which has been the 
bane of middle-class liberalism. He 
complains with a sorrowful indignation 
of people who " appear to have no 
57 



#T-> 



Sweetness and Light 



proper estimate of the value of the 
franchise ; " he leads his disciples to 
believe — what the Englishman is 
always too ready to believe — that the 
having a vote, like the having a large 
family, or a large business, or large 
muscles, has in itself some edifying and 
perfecting effect upon human nature. 
Or else he cries out to the democracy, 
— "the men," as he calls them, 
" upon whose shoulders the greatness 
of England rests," — he cries out to 
them : " See what you have done ! I 
look over this country and see the 
cities you have built, the railroads you 
have made, the manufactures you have 
produced, the cargoes which freight 
the ships of the greatest mercantile 
navy the world has ever seen ! I see 
that you have converted by your 



Sweetness and Light 






labours what was once a wilderness, 
these islands, into a fruitful garden ^ I 
know that you have created this wealth, 
and are a nation whose name is a word 
of power throughout all the world." 
Why, this is just the very style of 
laudation with which Mr. Roebuck or 
Mr. Lowe debauches the minds of the 
middle classes, and makes such Philis- 
tines of them. It is the same fashion 
of teaching a man to value himself, not 
on what he is, not on his progress in 
sweetness and light, but on the num- 
ber of the railroads he has constructed, 
or the bigness of the tabernacle he has 
built. Only the middle classes are 
told they have done it all with their 
energy, self-reliance, and capital, and 
the democracy are told they have done 
it d\l with their hands and sinews, 
59 



-^ Sweetness and Light 

But teaching the democracy to put its 
trust in achievements of this kind is 
merely training them to be Philistines 
to take the place of the Philistines 
whom they are superseding ; and they, 
too, like the middle class, will be en- 
couraged to sit down at the banquet of 
the future without having on a wed- 
ding garment, and nothing excellent 
can then come from them. Those 
who know their besetting faults, those 
who have watched them and listened 
to them, or those who will read the in- 
structive account recently given of them 
by one of themselves, the journeyman 
Engineer^ will agree that the idea which 
culture sets before us of perfection, — 
an increased spiritual activity, having 
for its characters increased sweetness, 
increased light, increased life, increased 
(^9 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

sympathy, — is an idea which the new 
democracy needs far more than the 
idea of the blessedness of the franchise, 
or the wonderfulness of its own in- 
dustrial performances. 

Other well-meaning friends of this 
new power are for leading it, not in 
the old ruts of middle-class Philistin- 
ism, but in ways which are naturally 
alluring to the feet of democracy, 
though in this country they are novel 
and untried ways. I may call them 
the ways of Jacobinism. Violent in- 
dignation with the past, abstract sys- 
tems of renovation applied wholesale, 
a new doctrine drawn up in black and 
white for elaborating down to the very 
smallest details a rational society for 
the future, — these are the ways of 
Jacobinism. Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
6i 






Sweetness and Light 



and other disciples of Comte, — one 
of them, Mr. Congreve, is an old 
friend of mine, and I am glad to have 
an opportunity of publicly expressing 
my respect for his talents and charac- 
ter, — are among the friends of democ- 
racy who are for leading it in paths of 
this kind. Mr. Frederic Harrison is 
very hostile to culture, and from a 
natural enough motive; for culture is 
the eternal opponent of the two things 
which are the signal marks of Jacobin- 
ism, — its fierceness, and its addiction 
to an abstract system. Culture is 
always assigning to system-makers and 
systems a smaller share in the bent of 
human destiny than their friends like. 
A current in people's minds sets 
toward new ideas ; people are dissatis- 
fied with their old narrow stock of 

62 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon ideas, or 
any other; and some man, some 
Bentham or Comte, who has the real 
merit of having early and strongly felt 
and helped the new current, but who 
brings plenty of narrowness and mis- 
takes of his own into his feeling and 
help of it, is credited with being the 
author of the whole current, the fit 
person to be entrusted with its regula- 
tion and to guide the human race. 

The excellent German historian of 
the mythology of Rome, Preller, relat- 
ing the introduction at Rome under the 
Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, 
the god of light, healing, and reconcili- 
ation, will have us observe that it was 
not so much the Tarquins who brought 
to Rome the new worship of Apollo, 
as a current in the mind of the Roman 
63 



^ Sweetness and Light 

people which set powerfully at that 
time toward a new worship of this 
kind, and away from the old run of 
Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a 
similar way, culture directs our atten- 
tion to the natural current there is in 
human affairs, and to its continual 
working, and will not let us rivet our 
faith upon any one man and his do igs. 
It makes us see not only his good side, 
but also how much in him was of ne- 
cessity limited and transient ; nay, it 
even feels a pleasure, a sense of an 
increased freedom and of an ampler 
future, in so doing. 

I remember, when I was under the 
influence of a mind to which I feel the 
greatest obligations, the mind of a man 
who was the very incarnation of sanity 
and clear sense, a man the most con- 
64 



Sweetness and Light 



trrr 



siderable, it seems to me, whom 
America has yet produced, — Ben- 
jamin Franklin, — I remember the re- 
Hef with which, after long feeling the 
sway of Franklin's imperturbable com- 
mon sense, I came upon a project of 
his for a new version of the Book of 
Job to replace the old version, the 
styl of which, says Franklin, has be- 
come obsolete, and thence less agreeable. 
*' I give," he continues, " a few verses, 
which may serve as a sample of the 
kind of version I would recommend." 
We all recollect the famous verse in 
our translation : " Then Satan an- 
swered the Lord and said : ' Doth Job 
fear God for nought ? ' " Franklin 
makes this : " Does your Majesty im- 
agine that Job's good conduct is the 
effect of personal attachment and afFec- 

65 



^ Sweetness and Light 

tion ? " I well remember how, when 
first I read that, I drew a deep breath 
of relief and said to myself: " After all, 
there is a stretch of humanity beyond 
Franklin's victorious good sense ! " 
So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly 
up as the renovator of modern society, 
and Bentham's mind and ideas pro- 
posed as the rulers of our future, I 
open the " Deontology." There I 
read : " While Xenophon was writ- 
ing his history, and Euclid teaching 
geometry, Socrates and Plato were 
talking nonsense under pretence of 
talking wisdom and morality. This 
morality of theirs consisted in words : 
this wisdom of theirs was the denial 
of matters known to every man's ex- 
perience." From the moment of read- 
ing that, I am delivered from the 

'LofC. 66 



Sweetness and Light ^ 

bondage of Bentham ! the fanaticism 
of his adherents can touch me no 
longer. I feel the inadequacy of his 
mind and ideas for supplying the rule 
of human society, for perfection. 

Culture tends always thus to deal 
with the men of a system, of disciples 
of a school ; with men like Comte, 
or the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill. 
However much it may find to admire 
in these personages, or in some of 
them, it nevertheless remembers the 
text : " Be not ye called Rabbi ! " and 
it soon passes on from any Rabbi. But 
Jacobinism loves a Rabbi ; it does not 
want to pass on from its Rabbi in pur- 
suit of a future and still unreached 
perfection ; it wants its Rabbi and his 
ideas to stand for perfection, that they 
may with the more authority recast the 
^1 



^ Sweetness and Light 

world ; and for Jacobinism, therefore, 
culture — eternally passing onwards 
and seeking — is an impertinence and 
an offence. But culture, just because 
it resists this tendency of Jacobinism 
to impose on us a man with limitations 
and errors of his own along with the 
true ideas of which he is the organ, 
really does the world and Jacobinism 
itself a service. 

So, too. Jacobinism, in its fierce 
hatred of the past, and of those whom 
it makes liable for the sins of the past, 
cannot away with the inexhaustible 
indulgences proper to culture, the con- 
sideration of circumstances, the severe 
judgment of actions joined to the mer- 
ciful judgment of persons. " The man 
of culture is in politics," cries Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, " one of the poorest 
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mortals alive ! " Mr. Frederic Harri- 
son wants to be doing business, and he 
complains that the man of culture stops 
him with a " turn for small fault-find- 
ing, love of selfish ease, and indecision 
in action." Of what use is culture, he 
asks, except for " a critic of new books 
or a professor of belles-lettres ? " Why, 
it is of use because, in presence of the 
fierce exasperation which breathes, or 
rather, I may say, hisses through the 
whole production in which Mr. Fred- 
eric Harrison asks that question, it 
reminds us that the perfection of hu- 
man nature is sweetness and light. It 
is of use because, like religion, — that 
other effort after perfection, — it testi- 
fies that, where bitter envying and strife 
are, there is confusion and every evil 
work. 

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^ Sweetness and Light 

The pursuit of perfection, then, is 
the pursuit of sweetness and light. He 
who works for sweetness and light, 
works to make reason and the will of 
God prevail. He who works for 
machinery, he who works for hatred, 
works only for confusion. Culture 
looks beyond machinery, culture hates 
hatred ; culture has one great passion, 
the passion for sweetness and light. It 
has one even yet greater ! — the passion 
for making them prevail. It is not sat- 
isfied till we all come to a perfect man ; 
it knows that the sweetness and light 
of the few must be imperfect until the 
raw and unkindled masses of humanity 
are touched with sweetness and light. 
If I have not shrunk from saying that 
we must work for sweetness and light, 
so neither have I shrunk from saying 
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Sweetness and Light ^ 

that we must have a broad basis, must 
have sweetness and hght for as many 
as possible. Again and again I have 
insisted how those are the happy 
moments of humanity, how those are 
the marking epochs of a people's life, 
how those are the flowering times for 
literature and art and all the creative 
power of genius, when there is a 
national glow of life and thought, when 
the whole of society is in the fullest 
measure permeated by thought, sensible 
to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only 
it must be real thought and real 
beauty ; real sweetness and real light. 
Plenty of people will try to give the 
masses, as they call them, an intellec- 
tual food prepared and adapted in the 
way they think proper for the actual 
condition of the masses. The ordinary 
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Sweetness and Light 



popular literature is an example of this 
way of working on the masses. Plenty 
of people will try to indoctrinate the 
masses with the set of ideas and judg- 
ments constituting the creed of their 
own profession or party. Our religious 
and political organisations give an 
example of this way of working on the 
masses. I condemn neither way ; but 
culture works differently. It does not 
try to teach down to the level of 
inferior classes ; it does not try to win 
them for this or that sect of its own, 
with ready-made judgments and watch- 
words. It seeks to do away with 
classes ; to make the best that has 
been thought and known in the world 
current everywhere; to make all men 
live in an atmosphere of sweetness and 
light, where they may use ideas, as it 
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uses them itself, freely, — nourished 
and not bound by them. 

This is the social idea ; and the men 
of culture are the true apostles of 
equality. The great men of culture 
are those who have had a passion for 
diffusing, for making prevail, for carry- 
ing from one end of society to the 
other, the best knowledge, the best 
ideas of their time ; who have laboured 
to divest knowledge of all that was 
harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, pro- 
fessional, exclusive ; to humanise it, to 
make it efficient outside the clique of 
the cultivated and learned, yet still re- 
maining the best knowledge and thought 
of the time, and a true source, there- 
fore, of sweetness and light. Such a 
man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, 
in spite of all his imperfections ; and 
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^ Sweetness and Light 

hence the boundless emotion and en- 
thusiasm which Abelard excited. Such 
were Lessing and Herder in Germany, 
at the end of the last century , and 
their services to Germany were in this 
way inestimably precious. Genera- 
tions will pass, and literary monu- 
ments will accumulate, and works far 
more perfect than the works of Lessing 
and Herder will be produced in Ger- 
many ; and yet the names of these two 
men will fill a German with a rever- 
ence and enthusiasm such as the names 
of the most gifted masters will hardly 
awaken. And why ? Because they 
humanised knowledge ; because they 
broadened the basis of life and intel- 
ligence ; because they worked power- 
fully to diffuse sweetness and light, to 
make reason and the will of God pre- 
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Sweetness and Light ^ 

vail. With St. Augustine they said : 
" Let us not leave thee alone to make 
in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou 
didst before the creation of the firma- 
ment, the division of light from dark- 
ness; let the children of thy spirit, 
placed in their firmament, make their 
light shine upon the earth, mark the 
division of night and day, and an- 
nounce the revolution of the times ; for 
the old order is passed, and the new 
arises; the night is spent, the day is 
come forth : and thou shalt crown the 
year with thy blessing, when thou shalt 
send forth labourers into the harvest 
sown by other hands than theirs ; when 
thou shalt send forth new labourers to 
new seed-times, whereof the harvest 
shall be not yet." 

THE END 

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Oct 2 leoi 



